What is the purpose of a philosophical education today?

I take an instrumentalist view of the value of philosophy and unapologetically so. I think philosophy cultivates vital skills, which I call survival skills. It’s valuable because it cultivates these skills which we need now more than ever.

At the moment, I’ve been thinking a lot about the omni-crises we find ourselves in; we've got the climate and eco-crisis, yawning inequality and geo-political instability. You might think that we're in peril, and ask: what are the skills we need to survive? These skills might include things like growing your own food—practical competencies that are obviously important. But I also think that the ability to think carefully and critically, to listen charitably to other people and to understand where they're coming from, and to try and make decisions and solve problems together in dialogue—these things are that are practical too, and absolutely fundamental to our survival. They are also part of what it means to flourish as a human being, in my view. So, the purpose of a philosophical education is that to equip people of all ages with these skills – which are as important as literacy and numeracy. So that's why I think a philosophical education is vital—at this moment in time in particular, but I think it’s also the case that these skills are perennially useful too.

But I guess I should say that whilst I understand philosophy as being a substantive subject that is studied by—and produced by—academics – I also understand it as something public. Public philosophy and academic philosophy are both philosophy to me. I understand public philosophy in three ways: One is philosophy for the public, which involves academics digesting their scholarly works for op-eds, or talks or festivals etc. The second is philosophy with the public, where academics or experts of some kind, do philosophy in public places with publics. And then there's also philosophy by the public, which could be philosophy by kids or by pub-groups, or it can be done by people in workplaces and in business, as well as by policymakers weaving philosophical practises into the ways they make decisions. These are the places where philosophy really lives and breathes as part of our democracy and as part of public discourse. I'm really interested in that latter kind of public philosophy because, to my mind, the biggest value of philosophy is when it's widely practised by publics. My utopia would be a place where philosophy is a very ordinary and commonplace part of everyone's education from early on, where they learn to engage in philosophical dialogue in particular—even more so than with having to write philosophy. And that people are taught the skills of philosophising, just as they are taught things like literacy and numeracy. So, while I do love academic philosophy and consider myself an academic philosopher in some senses, I see the real magic happening in the widespread practice of philosophical inquiry.

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What inspired you to first get involved public philosophy?

I became involved in public philosophy while I was still an undergraduate philosophy student at Leeds in the early 2000. I first worked on summer programmes and set up workshops for local school children before founding Thinking Space n 2008. It’s been central to my work ever since and I’ve worked in all kinds of public contexts incusing schools, prisons, museums and businesses.  

In 2020 I co-edited a book, Philosophy & Community: Theories, Practices and Possibilities with Prof Richard Smith and Dr Amanda Fullford. The book is about the different practices of public philosophy. In one of the chapters I compared amateur five-a-side football—the kind that happens for some people on a Sunday afternoon— with that of public philosophy. I claimed that while people clearly appreciate seeing professional footballers at the top of their game, there's also a value to people having a kickabout on a weekend; it benefits people’s mental health and creates a sense of community. But this kind of recreational participation in football is often maligned as mere amateurishness, as something that falls short of professionalism. It’s seen as a poor relation of what is considered ‘proper’ football (where you’re ‘properly’ paid for it). But I think that's wrong: These are just two species of the same good practice.

There is also a disanalogy with academic philosophy and football, which is this: whilst millions of people absolutely love watching professional footballers for fun, millions of people aren’t going to read academic philosophy for the same kind of pleasure and connection! And so for philosophy to really reveal its full value, it has to be more widely practised in schools and among publics. People need to do it themselves to see its value.

This leads me to my specific interest in ethics education. Ethics education is an important site for public philosophy. It is an essential part of formative schooling; it is absolutely everywhere, and it requires philosophical skill (on the part of teachers and students) to do it well. This might not be obvious, because ethics education is hidden in plain sight in our education system. There are no ethics education lessons on the timetable, instead ethics is woven into the ethos of the school, it’s expressed in value statements on the website or in assemblies. It's expressed in the way that teachers reprimand their students, or in how they try to set a good example.

There's a great deal of explicit ethics education that happens when you dialogue with people across different ways of seeing situations. When you try to agree on a shared view, and try to figure out how to live together. I think that is an obvious way that philosophy can make a positive contribution. But it should be so much more prevalent in education from earlier stages because these opportunities for ethical dialogue across differences are especially needed in a much more pluralistic and divided world. We need to be able to speak philosophically about ethics in all areas of the curriculum, and not just in context of talking respectfully about religion—which is currently the main opportunity to learn about philosophy and ethics for school students across Scotland, Wales and England.

One of the things that is quite odd about the current location of philosophy and ethics in the various national curricula of the UK, is that is that it potentially positions philosophy as being a subject in which everybody has their own ‘personal philosophy’—that is a set of private beliefs which must be tolerated, but not discussed, much like politics! According to this view, you don't ever try to convince a person to see something differently because you ought not to do that about someone's religion. Philosophy, when viewed this way, is a kind of religion or world-view. I think this is a mistaken view of what philosophy is or could be. I also think that the persistent inclusion of philosophy within Religious Education in English, Welsh and Scottish curricula (although there are some exceptions in Scotland) confuses people. When I've told people I'm a philosopher in the past, people have asked if that’s a kind of religion.

As I’m sure readers know, Philosophy of Religion is just one subset of philosophy as a discipline, which sits underneath—or above, depending on your preferred metaphor—all of the other forms of inquiry by calling into question their methods and substantive knowledge. So, if we end up seeing philosophy as sort of subdivision of religion—rather than the other way around—we may not realise that there is philosophy of technology, philosophy of art, etc. Philosophy is also a kind of pedagogy that has a place in every subject even maths and science. These fields also have fundamental concepts and methods which can be called into question, and it’s there that you find philosophy. People don't appreciate its scope as a discipline and I think that is partly because few teachers will have ever had any philosophy in their education—nor have their parents, or their parents’ parents.

In bookshops, philosophy is so often next to religion, but it could just as well occupy the space next to science or maths.  Of course, there are many things that philosophy shares in common with science and maths, but there's also many things that it doesn't. I've heard philosophy described by Dr Stephen Law as ‘an armchair discipline’ quite like pure maths, but I disagree with that. Philosophy is both theoretical and deeply practical. It’s also highly reflexive. I think philosophy is one of the few subjects that really questions its own identity. So where does philosophy belong in the bookshop? I think it needs to go right at the very front—since it's so foundational. In my bookshop, you have to walk through philosophy first and after that, everything else follows.


How have you tried to realise this vision for philosophy in your work as of late?

I started Thinking Space when I was just out of university. That was initially a freelance practice before it later became a not-for-profit that allowed me to do public philosophy in any space I felt it could make a difference in. It was also a kind of creative project where I would be asking: How many different partners and places can I go to and persuade that philosophy could have a role in their work? So, I went to art galleries, theatres, colleges and universities, and persuaded people to do philosophy projects with me. But it was a different time economically then and there was quite a lot money for interesting educational projects sloshing around in England, so I had every opportunity to do that work. It's a different picture now, it's much more economically, politically and culturally challenging.

The public philosophy organisation that I now co-lead is Thoughtful, which was established in 1992 by people who were trained in the US with Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp, who were the originators of Philosophy For Children (P4C) movement. So, they started to develop what they called the ‘Community of Inquiry’ in the late 1960s and early 70s — influenced by John Dewey's work on community in education, as well as Charles Sanders Pierce’s work on the community of scientific inquiry. So, Lipman and Sharp were the intellectual originators Thoughtful – what was then called SAPERE – and I became involved in their work around 2008.

I actually arrived at an interest in doing philosophy with children before I learned there was a movement of likeminded people. Funnily enough, for a short while in my early twenties, I thought that I’d invented P4C! As a teenager, I had experienced theatre-makers coming into my secondary comprehensive to devise drama pieces together as a little community. I had been one of those kids and I thought it was absolutely incredible to work collaboratively to explore the world through stories and creativity. That had the most profound impact on me at school. Later I thought, what if you could do the same thig with philosophy? What if we could break students out of the structures of school and give them free range to explore ideas? It was a romantic (and perhaps unrealistic) idea, but I still very clearly recall deciding that ‘this is what I want to do with my life’ when I was still a second year undergraduate. So I started to research more about public philosophy and found that there were already people doing this kind of work in schools. I set up Thinking Space at that point, and then joined what was then SAPERE – now Thoughtful – a few years later. Then in 2022, they were looking for a Co-Director and I took that on as a ‘proper job’.  

Returning of your original question concerning how this helps to realise the sort of vision of philosophy that I've been talking about, Thoughtful aims to realise the benefits of a philosophical education as widely and equitably as possible. Our work was initially very much focused on bringing philosophy into primary schools and secondary schools in England, but we now serve the whole of the UK and we work with colleges, universities, museums, galleries prisons and hospitals. We are interested in — and committed to — the different ways we can do philosophy well and also how philosophical skills can help to benefit the most disadvantaged in society.

We help achieve that by training teachers to practise philosophical inquiry by working directly with children and young people, by creating resources, conferences, networks and structures that support people who practise P4C, as well as influencing policy by trying to set up an All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) which will help us advocate for the philosophical inquiry. One of the other things we do is give adults positive experiences of doing public philosophy, because they're the active decision-makers in society and, as I said earlier, they generally haven’t had philosophy in their education, so they also need to realise the immense value of this way of speaking, listening and thinking. We achieve this through workshops and other experiences that help people realise how impactful philosophical dialogue can be. I really do feel a vocation to do this kind of work – to use an old-fashioned word. It's a perfect job for me, and I don't know what I would do if I was doing this.

How did we get here?

I don't entirely know what the answer is to that but in the UK, particularly in England, though less so in Scotland, we have some cultural and some structural reasons why philosophy is side-lined. We are in a kind of vicious cycle where people are not being exposed to it when they're young, so they have lots of misapprehensions about what it is, which in turn means that it never quite gets to see the light of day on the scale that I would wish for. I know, for example, that you can do a Higher in Philosophy in Scotland, and that there's a National 5 qualification. Wales has also got a brand-new curriculum that is underpinned by what they call the ‘Four Purposes’, which are themselves quite philosophically reflective. This is driven by posing questions like ‘What are we all here for’, and ‘What is our philosophy of education?’ In one sense, this is absolutely what any curriculum should be built around, because it's so bloody obvious, but it's also quite revolutionary. So, in the Welsh context, they are further ahead than the English context in terms of being motivated by philosophical questions. The same can be said for the Scottish context, where there is some space for philosophy to be pursued as an academic subject in secondary school. Meanwhile in England philosophy is largely absent from the curriculum, except for some RE syllabi. However, the long-awaited Curriculum and Assessment Review has just been published and it emphasises the important of oracy (generally defined as speaking, listening and communication — to which we add ‘and thinking!’). Relatedly, P4C is an excellent approach to oracy that focuses on the conversations that really count in schools. This might be a way to reposition philosophy in the English context.

The lowly status of philosophy in England is especially strange when we recall the role of Britain in the Enlightenment—the intellectual movement famous for separating religion from other forms of knowledge, in alignment with empiricism and early science. While I’m not quite sure how we’ve gotten in to this position over the last few hundred years, I would say in more recent times, it will certainly have something to do with having had fifteen years of Conservativism through the Tory party, alongside a much older historical tradition of small ‘c’ conservatism in schooling and in society.

This isn’t to say that philosophy is Liberal as a discipline, but that there is something small ‘l’ liberal about teaching people to think and this conservatism that's influenced UK education policy—at least throughout my career and lifetime— has been one in which kind of you teach children the fundamentals and you teach them as much knowledge as possible. This is the very influential notion of a knowledge rich curriculum, where you pack children's heads with as much information as possible with an emphasis on ‘proper’ (read: economically productive) subjects like science, technology, engineering and maths where there are safe, settled answers on which everyone can agree. I think this is a very technocratic idea; that what will help us is what will be best for an economy in which we all become top tax-band engineers and computer programmers. Part of understanding the value of philosophy requires you to be philosophically capable enough to stand back and recognise that there are actually quite a lot of benefits of education that aren't measured in GDP – like well-being. The catch-22 is that recognising the value of a philosophical education will often require one to have had a philosophical education in the first place.

Returning to what I said earlier about the age of omni-crises, our current situation raises such massive existential questions that we’re quite ill equipped to answer—especially those surrounding climate and economic injustice. These are questions like: ‘What is this all really for?’, and ‘What can we be hopeful about?’ These are the kinds of questions where philosophy can provide solutions or failing that, some consolation.

So I think the exclusion of philosophy from British education is a combination of small ‘c’ conservativism alongside capitalist-technocratic agendas. But Jane Gatley—a Philosopher of Education in Swansea—helpfully suggests that a lot of what has happened in the history of education is not by design, but by happenstance. And since educational institutions like to replicate the status-quo, if philosophy has not been on the curriculum for generations, then that's the way it will likely to continue.

Despite this, its absence on the curriculum shouldn't make us think that philosophy is not there in schools. It is very much there and one of the biggest examples of that you see is in the places where ethics is taught. Most notably now that is in relationships and sex education (RSE). There’s a novel kind of dynamism there in which this is effectively a new subject full of ethical and social questions about how people live together, how they manage their bodies, how they deal with consent, how they love each other, how they end relationships with each other: that is philosophy.

Sophie Collins is a colleague of mine who is also very experienced in relationships and sex education. They say that if all RSE educators were philosophically trained, it would be ideal for the subject, and I think the same is true in Citizenship, which is also a deeply philosophical subject. So philosophy is there on the curriculum but it’s just not called that. One of the main ways in which Thoughtful advocates for philosophy is actually not to add it as a curriculum subject but to ensure that there's this practisce of philosophical skills anywhere and everywhere.

We are less focused on carving out ‘an hour on the curriculum’ for philosophy or ensuring there is a satisfactory exam specification for the academic subject. The kind of philosophising we endorse is not mandated nor examined, since those things tend to kill the joy present in this way of thinking. We advocate for philosophy as a pedagogy and a practice that is conducive to flourishing at school and in society.

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It sounds as though there is a large historical tradition of Pragmatism at the centre of your view of public philosophy, as well as with the projects you work within with your colleagues. Could you expand on this and how this informed your view on education?

Pragmatism starts from an epistemological position that lends itself to dialogue. In our work there is a notion—inspired by Charles Sanders Peirce—that we can create ‘Communities of Philosophical Inquiry’ (CoPI), where we think together, encounter multiple perspectives, and engage in a kind of democratic, distributed thinking, in which we are capable of achieving insights otherwise unavailable to us when we think alone. In this Pragmatist framing ‘the truth’ can be, provisionally, what works and what emerges  from process of negotiation of meanings between people. Importantly humans are fallible when it comes to truth due to the partial and limited nature of our experience, our deficits in reasoning and our vices. This thought is continued in the work of Lipman and Sharp, who developed a model of doing philosophy that incorporates critical, creative and caring thinking as key thinking dispositions of the CoPI. refers to the kind of reasoning and criteria-application that people typically associate with philosophy. Creative thinking, although people associate it only with the arts, refers to the generative examples, anecdotes, and solutions that emerge within a CoPI. But there’s also this deeply social, emotional, and ethical dimension to that community in how we think together – and this is something that Ann Margaret Sharp really emphasised in the notion of caring thinking, which she says is caring for you interlocutors as human beings who are coming from particular positions, and being mindful and respectful of that as well as caring for the subject matter. One of the founders of SAPERE in the UK, Roger Sutcliffe, also added collaborative thinking to this model, which is a kind of reinstatement of the fact that we do this in community, which means building on and interacting with other people's ideas, in order to go further than we could alone.

I think this model of the ‘4Cs’  learning to think well means that the CoPI does make its own discoveries – child and adult participants do gain insight and clarity;  they can see complexity more clearly; they often come up with provisional answers and they also acquire the kinds of skills that allow them live together. This is an idea that is also rooted in Pragmatism. In this kind of community, you’re not just colleagues in this endeavour to find out the answer to X or Y; you are participants in a democracy trying to think and to live alongside each other.

My PhD — which was recently awarded by the Institute of Education at UCL — is about ethics education. In that research, I offered a history on what I call the dominance of ‘doctrinaire thinking’ in ethical inquiry, in reference to Kantianism and Utilitarianism. I found that despite the resurgence of Virtue Ethics in the 1950s, there remains an attraction to these doctrinaire forms of ethics. And I came to believe that it is reductionism, the longing for a clear decision-making criterion, and the appeal of “objectivity” that motivates this attraction.

The Community of Philosophical Inquiry subverts this idea that you can be reductive about complex issues or that you can arrive at a final answer that will convince and satisfy everyone. Instead, this offers an environment where meaning is messy, and the right course of action is contextual. This is difficult for some people to cope with. But we must learn to cope, as there is little that reductive doctrinaire ethical thinking can tell us about how to navigate issues as complex as, for example, the climate and eco-crisis.  

When you have an academic dialogue in philosophy, especially in analytic tradition, it is organised in a certain kind of way and there are conventions around which kinds comments are appropriate to make. You need to offer arguments, and then objections, and then replies to those objections. Whereas dialogue in a CoPI model ebbs and flows; it allows people (who are generally ‘amateurs’ and not ‘professionals’) to be associative, share anecdotes, move around, go off-track and then be brought back again. There is a sort of mess and chaos and freedom to it that allows narrative modes of thinking and philosophical modes of thinking to intermingle.

Matthew Lipman describes the progress of inquiry as ‘like a boat tacking into the wind’ its trajectory goes this way and then that way, such that it is always moving forward, but it's buffeted by different forces and it's progress is not a straight line. I think everyone who's ever facilitated a class discussion has probably had that realisation that it doesn’t progress in a linear way.

This messy trajectory might seem ill-suited to an education system that is full of sequenced knowledge that can be objectively assessed. People might think that a better approach would be to teach philosophy through a chronological history of ideas. But at least for younger people and novices, I think dialogue is better. A dialogical approach helps people to pursue questions that matter to them and make sense of their lives.

That said, it is not true that a dialogical approach must necessarily neglect the canon of philosophy. Some of my colleagues are really good at waiting for the opportune moment where an idea from the history of ideas is just the perfect thing to help give shape to a child’s idea. This can be a great way to bring children into dialogue with the history of ideas. It is so much more natural than teaching them that the canon has been sorted already and all they need do is shut up and listen. I really value philosophical enquiry in which canonical philosophical ideas and the ideas that emerge from philosophical novices are ‘in conversation’ with each other.  

Could you tell us more about your own research into the role and value of narrative in a philosophical education?

While philosophical enquiry is a big focus of my academic work, I’m also interested in non-philosophical forms of thinking and knowing. My thesis is on the significance of stories in ethics education and in it I write about how philosophical inquiry can only take you so far. You also need narrative ways of thinking.

I argue that while narrative is a familiar feature of ethics education and educators are adept at teaching ‘the moral of the story’, this kind of instruction alone doesn’t cultivate the practical wisdom needed to determine what matters in life and what makes it go well. For this, we need inquiry that is sensitive to the significance of narrative in ethical life and learning.

I propose a broad conception of ethics, centred on the Aristotelian question: ‘How should I live?’. I also develop an expansive view of narrative in which stories are both products (such as novels, films, and news reports) but also practices—or what Jerome Bruner (a psychologist who was also an influential figure in P4C) calls ‘modes of cognition’. On this basis, I argue that narrative and ethics are intimately connected.

I also draw on Martha Nussbaum, who views literature as a form of ethical inquiry, by exploring how narrative cultivates ethical perception and contributes to an inquiry that enables perceptions to ‘converse’ with principles. Then through historical and contemporary examples of practice, I show that narrative is ubiquitous and indispensable in ethics education. I also demonstrate the complementary roles of instruction and inquiry—arguing that while both support ethical development, only dialogic inquiry creates the necessary conditions for the autonomous and responsible exercise of practical wisdom, which is essential for ethics education.

I conclude by proposing a model of perceptive, reflective inquiry that is narrative-centric and ethical (PRINCE). I offer broad-brush recommendations for the curricula and pedagogies that would support this approach and argue that to realize the potential of narrative in ethics education, we must look beyond the moral of the story.

Among my favourite forms of doing public philosophy that exemplify this idea of PRINCE  are the collaborations that I've done through Thinking Space and other organisations, where I've worked with artists, storytellers, and in particular, theatre makers. I think of these collaborations as oscillations between the narrative mode and the philosophical or logical mode. One particular way of working is called Dramatic Inquiry. This involves full immersion in the narrative situation, where we explore and improvise decision-making in-role within an imaginary world before then stepping out of that world to call into question those decisions. It’s such a playful yet profound way of working. That movement between story space and logical space is really deeply ethically educative. In my view, readers familiar with academic philosophy might argue that stories are already part of the philosophical method. It’s certainly true that philosophers use thought experiments that are story-like in some ways.

One of the things I've written about in my thesis is how poorly a lot of philosophy understands the power of narrative, most especially in ethics. For instance, thought-experiments have been traditionally understood in as being similar to scientific experiments in that they remove extraneous variables so that you can see clearly what really matters. In ethics, however, what that often means is that they remove all the variables that deeply matter. When it comes to ethics, it’s all in the variables—the devil’s in the detail. In the classic example by Philippa Foot they say: there's a trolley and there's only two tracks, and there's five people on one side and one on the other, and so on. Everything's nice and neat and you're not allowed to question those features too much and ask: ‘Wait, why am I overseeing this scene?’, ‘How do I know how the trolley lever works?’, ‘Are there any kids or other vulnerable people down there?’. You're not allowed to ask any of these questions because your told that that's not playing by the rules of the story. You've been told everything you need to know and everything else is supposed to be an extraneous variable. But that is not true. These things are really important! If I'm standing next to someone who works for the train company, they can pull the lever—I'm not doing it! So, this is all highly relevant and richer stories with all these kinds of details are needed in thinking through realistic thought-experiments.

Thought experiments are widely used to teach ethics and I’ve been a prime offender! But a better way of teaching ethics is to present a chapter from a novel, where some of it is relevant and some of it's not, and it’s the students’ job is to figure out which is which. But teachers rarely do this and opt instead to simplify situations. For me, to simplify ethics is often to falsify ethics.

In my thesis, I also go on to talk about how my own philosophical and narrative forms of cognition have evolved over time. I often describe this using stories. One of the stories describes me as a nineteen-year-old undergraduate, when I would call my mum every couple of weeks as I was taking an ethics course. She's a Catholic and I had lost my religion at that point, so I’d call when I thought I had a great thought-experiment for her and we’d argue about ethical stuff.

One particular thought-experiment we’d talked about was where two people have fallen into the water, and there's only one place in the lifeboat. The moral dilemma was between whether you would save your husband or the doctor who's got the cure for cancer. My mum would say: ‘Can’t I just budge up in the lifeboat or just sit on Dad's knee and then everyone could live?’ And I’d resist with ‘No mum! There's only one space!’. But she was just doing what a sensible person would if they wanted to understand if the horns of the dilemma were really this stark, or whether there really wasn’t a third way? And when I’d explain that there's not a third way and that she wasn’t playing right, she’d say: ‘It’s not really a game, is it? You're talking about drowning your dad!’. But in a way, she was what I would call more narrative competent than me at that age, where I was seeing ethical dilemmas like games—I think a lot of philosophers see them like games but they're not.

I think that the more philosophy complicated stories and current affairs, the better. I think the problems with so-called ‘trolleyology’—where there's been this massive literature about this one very unrealistic trolley problem – is that whilst it's dark and interesting in some ways, it's just not a very helpful or relevant problem—despite the fact that so much energy has been spent on it. And I've also now contributed to that literature by mocking it!

There's so much academic philosophy looking at real contemporary issues. I was recently at an ethics conference at Leeds University, where Helen Frowe gave a keynote on the ethics of the spy cops scandal—an issue so much more complex yet revealing of the human condition than trolley problem ‘narratives’.

The academic philosophy that I celebrate the most is very concerned with the world and how it can make itself useful. Philosophy as an academic discipline is under threat at the moment. We are seeing so many philosophy departments in the UK closing down and others under pressure. So there is now an existential motivation for the discipline to be more outward looking, as well as interested in articulating and defending the wider value of philosophy—besides being marketed as just securing jobs for the boys!

What do you make of the present and future state of philosophy in the academies?

Given that I now work in the charitable sector, I don't know whether I'm sufficiently qualified to comment on like trends in publishing and how philosophers at the top of their game are understanding their work.  My PhD's department at UCL was in the Institute of Education, where everybody is either a sociologist, historian, philosopher or empirical scientist, and they are all most all interested in highly practical questions. But that’s not typical.

Before that, my last academic job was with the IDEA Centre at the University of Leeds where, my teaching was in things like medical ethics, bioethics, engineering, ethics, sport and exercise, science ethics and performance ethics—all highly applied questions of philosophy. I've never been super interested in the ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?’ kind of philosophy.

My impression of academic philosophy today is that there is still an incentive for academics to specialise in ever-more tiny areas in order to carve out their niche. I don't think that philosophy will survive if that continues to be the culture, In a bean-counting world – people will always ask: ‘What good does that serve?’, or ultimately ‘What economic good does that serve?’. People building a whole career out of talking about a very specific issue to a very narrow group of specialists is a significant use of resources. In philosophy, I don't think it's as easy to justify as someone in bio-medicine doing the exact same thing in their tiny little niche. Whilst they get to contribute to a vaccine, it's much harder in philosophy to demonstrate its value in terms of (for example) lives saved.

What would be your ideal future philosophy curriculum and how can we get there?

There's couple of things: I think that philosophy should be taught as a golden thread running through the entire curriculum. In just the way that literacy doesn't just happen in English, it also happens in history and maths and so on, so it would be that there is philosophical dialogue and inquiry woven into every teacher’s pedagogy. To make this happen, all teachers will have had a bit of philosophical inquiry as part of their initial teacher training. Then at the higher levels, philosophy would be taught as a substantive subject as well, so that students could also be acquainted with the history of ideas and those that wanted to could gain qualifications in philosophy (as an academic subject).

I would also want to see a dedicated philosophy PGCE (or a PGDE as it’s called in Scotland) route available to philosophy graduates, so that they can train to be a philosophy teacher from the outset, rather than becoming a Religious Education teacher who happens to teach philosophy, or a history teacher who does a bit of philosophy on the side.

In a situation where children and young people took part in philosophical dialogue in primary and lower secondary and could study philosophy —taught by subject specialists—in upper secondary and sixth form, this would in turn, help save our university philosophy departments. Many more students would be familiar with the subject, aware of its practicality and utility for a wide range of careers, and therefore keen to study it at degree level.

I also think that if the publish or perish culture of academia were to change, this would transform philosophy too. People only prioritise publishing in high-ranking journals because their careers depend on it. But what if, instead, they could be praised and promoted for their work in public philosophy? What if we could celebrate academics who publish in newspapers and magazines or in personal blogs; if we could admire philosophers who go on the radio or get involved in documentaries? If there was this culture change, then philosophy would be so much more impactful. This kind of content reaches people and influences what they think and how they think.  Although we do need experts pushing at the frontiers. I think this public philosophy work is just as valuable, if not more valuable, than writing esoteric articles that only your colleagues read. This kind of culture change will likely come in part from a different kind of performance management.

An example of the promotional push towards more public philosophy outreach has come from The British Philosophy Association’s recent Philosophy Matters campaign that runs each year —which Thoughtful also contributes to. One of the things I love about the campaign is that it takes a really broad view of the benefits of philosophy. The organisers celebrate virtuoso philosophers at the top universities, which they rightly should (the world would be a worse place if people didn't get to read some of the most beautiful minds speaking about issues that are really important). But they also celebrate all the collaborative work that philosophers are engaged in with the sciences and technology at the frontiers of AI. They also have open arms for all the grassroots philosophy that's happening and the philosophy in schools that's happening.

This campaign is a great expression of philosophy’s public growth in the widest possible sense, and I think that's a really good direction of travel. Simon Kirchin, who leads it, is great. He’s a refreshingly outward looking person who thinks about the value of philosophy more generally. I think the campaign has been motivated in part by this fear of what's happening to UK philosophy departments. Philosophy departments need to take heed of that and think about, as I said earlier, how to articulate and defend the value of what they do in a wide range of ways. Not just how philosophy contributes to GDP. Philosophers are actually very well placed to do these kinds of broad defences of what they're doing.

But still, change is needed at all levels – from the youngest kids having a chance to philosophise, to the most experienced academics being incentivized to publish for audiences outside of the academies. Readers might think this kind of change is impossible, but philosophers are good at making arguments and solving problems.  I'm sure we can figure it out!

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Dr Grace Lockrobin (PhD, FHEA) is Co-Director of THOUGHTFUL (previously SAPERE) — a UK charity that improves learning and lives through philosophical enquiry. She is also a practising philosophy teacher, trainer, facilitator and researcher. Active in education and academia, she is a Council Member of The Royal Institute of Philosophy. an Editorial Board Member of the Journal of Philosophy in Schools, a Board Member of Sophia, and the Founder of Thinking Space. Grace has recently been awarded a PhD in Philosophy of Education by the Institute of Education, University College London. Her work is in education, ethics and aesthetics.